Education

My Language Skills offers language courses with an integrated foreign languages curriculum and a notional-functional approach. We offer materials in different languages aligned with the CEFR levels of language competence. Grounded on the system of learning objects, we aim for the courses to be flexible, easily adaptable and focused on developing all the language skills.

Our aim is to create content to teach languages rather than to learn languages. This decision plays a fundamental role in the way in which content is provided. That is why we allow teachers to personalise content by organising the content as Learning Objects.

Our content is correctly distributed and adapted to the students’ needs. We make sure that all the language competences in reading, writing, speaking and listening are practiced evenly.

Even though the purpose of teaching of a Second Language is communication, we also give importance to teaching grammar and vocabulary to meet the objectives of each unit.

We use recommendations from the Council of Europe through its Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) which splits a language in six levels through learning process. For each one of these levels, we have the following hours:

A1-75h; A2-95h; B1-120h; B2-150h; C1-150h; C2-150h.

We are convinced that we must not stick to any concrete approach, as each Second Language class has its own special needs, we prefer the eclectic methodology to any other one, offering the one which the student needs when they need it.

This educational itinerary was created following a Functional–Notional organisation of the content. A Functional-Notional syllabus is an approach where the materials are determined with Notions or ideas that learners expect to be able to express through the target language and the Functions acts learners expect to be able to accomplish. The content was distributed between the determined number of topics and units. Groups of Notions of similar themes were distributed to the different units, followed by the distribution of Functions so the theme of each unit is clearly visible. Cultural courses are integrated with the notions. Grammar is distributed in order of importance prioritising the verbs in the first half of the course and Orthographic courses are distributed in a didactic way.

The distribution of these various elements allows to set the objectives of each unit which with texts are unifying points for all the courses in different languages. That approach allow full integration with social tools (forums, cooperative tasks for the 4 skills, colaborative exercises…)

We base our courses on integrated foreign languages curriculum which offers a common core for all the different languages. This means that the teaching objectives of the particular units are the same in all the courses. The integrated foreign language curriculum is based on Curriculum made by Cervantes Institute in Spain. (Plan Curricular del Instituto Cervantes: niveles de referencia.)

This approach makes the courses flexible for the use by both teachers and students. We want to create courses that can be used in many different ways by means of web 4.0 rather than one multi-functional course that can be used for everything.